A lifetime’s ambition is fulfilled as I get to hear and see Wagner in Bayreuth...
Bayreuth
It is a lively, modern interpretation with the usual naked breasts and a willy on stage. We sit down at 3 p.m. and emerge at 9.40 p.m. utterly absorbed. Most of the audience cheers but there are some boos coming from the notorious box just behind us. The producer is Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of Richard. She is 29 and as she takes her bow her long blond hair sweeps her feet. I hope they make her the new boss of Bayreuth. If not, Covent Garden should hire her. Perhaps she will get the TUC to sponsor opera and I can realise another ambition — to see more opera in Britain on an MP’s pay. Another of my hosts is a big cheese at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which each year singles out a country’s writers for special attention. He says Frankfurt would like to make Britain and our writers the honoured country. But no one in Whitehall takes any interest. Perhaps Jim Purnell, our smart, 30-something Francophone Kultur secretary, can find some small change from the Olympics budget and show the world that writing in English, in Britain, is the liveliest in the world.
Earlier I had done my duty and spent time in the Lake District enjoying the soaking rain of an English summer holiday. I got thoroughly wet going up to Helms Crag above Grasmere to help Martin Wainwright — no relation to the Guardian’s genial northern editor — launch his biography of Alfred Wainwright. Alfred Wainwright’s hand-written and hand-drawn guides to walking in the Lakes are legendary. A member of the Wainwright Society tells me that Alfred went out each weekend to write his guides because he didn’t get on with his first wife. No doubt if he had had the right tax break he would have enjoyed his marriage and we would not enjoy his unique guides.
Compared to Wagner’s handsome mansion in Bayreuth, Dove Cottage in Grasmere where Wordsworth, family and friends all lived is a tiny hovel. The Wordsworth Museum needs a makeover. It explains little and displays Wordsworth’s travels on the Continent with countries like Czechoslovakia or communist East Germany still shown on a giant map. Chris Smith, now Lord Smith of Islington, did his PhD on Wordsworth and once gently corrected me in the Commons when I got a quote wrong. Can Master Purnell, who looks a bit like Shelley on his better days, put Lord Smith in charge of making the Wordsworth shrine at Grasmere fit for 21st-century visitors?
En route to Bayreuth, the lady doctor driving swerved in and out of the two-lane autobahn at 120 mph. German politicians like to proclaim their Greenness but a nation that produces Porsches, has no speed limits and rejects nuclear power cannot be taken seriously on carbon footprints. The German equivalent of the RAC campaigns on the slogan Freie Fahrt für Freie Bürger — roughly, free citizens can drive as fast as they like. Racing on German motorways may have meant freedom for the late Alan Clark. I was terrified. If there was a referendum on a common speed limit in Europe, I would vote yes. Going out to Germany, the time spent from arriving at the check-in at Heathrow to buying books at Borders was five minutes. The queues were awful on the way back, however, thanks to the hopeless management of immigration counters, half of which were not staffed. That’s Whitehall’s fault, not BAA’s.
Other than constituency work, I avoid politics for a whole month save for a friendly EU exchange with Irwin Stelzer on the Today programme. I am by now in the Alps for my annual climbing pilgrimage with one of my oldest friends, Roger Alton. Irwin is in San Francisco but the technical magicians of the BBC make it appear we are sharing the same phone. Before the interview our chatter is too friendly for Ed Stourton who demands stronger aggro when we go live to confront on Europe. Later I read a shrewd piece in the Telegraph by Stelzer in which he says Gordon Brown won’t be bullied into holding a referendum on the latest in the long line of EU treaties. A British Prime Minister not doing what the Daily Mail and William Hague say? Surely some mistake.
Why have all the gongs for hacks under New Labour gone to ferocious critics of the government like Paul Dacre, Sir Max Hastings or Sir Simon Jenkins? Kissing the hand that smashes you in the face seems excessive New Labour masochism. Disappointing friends and rewarding enemies can only go so far. Tony Blair’s farewell honours should repair the damage.
Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham.